David Grann: Stacy Speaks

The case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in Texas in 2004 and whom I wrote about for The New Yorker last month, has taken another strange twist. Yesterday, Willingham’s former wife, Stacy Kuykendall, released a statement to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram saying that he secretly confessed to killing their three daughters, who died in a fire on December 23, 1991. Her statement directly contradicts numerous previous statements she has made: in interviews with police and fire investigators; in testimony during the trial; in letters to public officials and Willingham’s lawyers; and in her comments to the press.

Recalling her visit to Willingham in prison shortly before his execution on February 17, 2004, Kuykendall told the Star-Telegram:

He asked if I remembered what I had told him that I was going to do after the first of the year [in 1992]. I said that I was going to divorce you. He said the night before the fire we got in to an argument and you had said it again that you were going to divorce me. I told him yes I did say that. He told me that he believed I was going to but he couldn’t let that happen. Todd told me that it was stupid but it was like an obsession. He said if I didn’t have my girls I couldn’t leave him and that I could never have Amber or the twins with anyone else but him. He told me he was sorry and that he hoped that I could forgive him one day.

Her statement is curious. Kuykendall has acknowledged that Willingham had asked to see her to help him in his bid for clemency. It seems unlikely that, moments after asking for this favor, he suddenly confessed to the murder of her children.

After the fire, police and fire investigators interrogated Kuykendall. Each time, she said that she and Todd had not fought the night before the blaze, and that they had gone to Kmart to pick up photographs of the family to get ready for their Christmas celebration. She never mentioned that she intended to divorce Willingham, whom she had married three months earlier. She said he would not have hurt the children.

She had this exchange with a police detective and the deputy state fire marshal, Manuel Vasquez:

VASQUEZ: Did you and your husband have any disagreements on the night after Kmart?

KUYKENDALL: No. No we didn’t.

VASQUEZ: Did he get angry at you for any reason?

KUYKENDALL: No.

She said that she and Willingham had not had a disagreement for two weeks. Vasquez asked her if he ever abused the children. She said, “No…. Our kids were spoiled rotten.”

During the penalty phase of the trial, she testified under oath. Once more, she never mentioned that they had fought the night before the fire or that she had threatened to divorce him, and she said that she was convinced he was innocent. “He’s never hurt those kids,” she said.

In her most recent statement explaining why she had once defended Willingham, she said,

After Todd was arrested and told his family that he didn’t do this, I had to believe that he was telling us the truth. I was 21, just lost all my children and now everyone expected me to believe that their father did this.

Yet Kuykendall continued to give the same version of events long after the fire and after she and Willingham were divorced. In 1999, she spoke to Elizabeth Gilbert, a teacher and playwright from Houston who had begun to investigate Willingham’s case. According to a tape recording of the conversation, Kuykendall made it clear that she still believed that Willingham was innocent and that he had no motive to hurt their children. She noted that he had an inadequate defense, saying of one of his lawyers, “He’s not a good lawyer. He’s just not.” She also said the prosecution was motivated to find anyone to blame. “I think they were after somebody,” she said. “They didn’t care who.” She said, “I don’t think he did it…. He was a mean person to me, but something like that, no.”

Willingham had written to Kuykendall, asking her to come visit. He wanted her help in his appeal for clemency and also to say goodbye. In his letter, Willingham insisted that he was innocent: “I hope that after I am gone that some day, some how the truth will be known and my name cleared.”

Around two weeks before the execution, Kuykendall went to see Willingham. Not long after their encounter, a leading fire investigator, Dr. Gerald Hurst, completed his review of the original investigation and concluded, as other leading fire investigators would in the years to come, that there was no scientific basis to determine that Willingham had set the fire, and that the original fire investigators had based their theories on discredited methods. His report was sent to authorities asking to postpone the execution. In a legal brief responding to Hurst’s report, the prosecution argued that the execution should go ahead, and included an affidavit from Willingham’s former brother-in-law Ronnie Kuykendall. According to the affidavit, he said that Stacy Kuykendall had told him and other family members that Willingham had confessed to her during her prison visit.

When I recently spoke to Tina Church, a private investigator who worked on Willingham’s behalf, she told me that she had spoken to Kuykendall right after their meeting in prison. Church recalls, “I point-blank asked Kuykendall, ‘Did he confess his guilt?’ And she said, ‘No.’ ”

In the fall of 2004, just months after Willingham’s execution, the Chicago Tribune reporters Steve Mills and Maurice Possley visited Kuykendall at her house and asked her if Willingham had, in fact, confessed to her. She said, firmly, that Willingham had never done so. Here is what Mills and Possley wrote:

The response from local prosecutors included a two-paragraph affidavit from Ronnie Kuykendall, the brother of Willingham’s former wife. He said that Kuykendall, who had divorced Willingham while he was on Death Row, had recently visited him, then gathered the family to say that he had confessed.

But she said in an interview that was untrue. At the time of the trial, she said she had believed in her husband’s innocence, but over the years, after studying the evidence and the trial testimony, she became convinced he was guilty. In their final meeting, however, he did not confess, she told the Tribune.

Yesterday, Possley, who is now an investigative researcher for the Northern California Innocence Project, at Santa Clara University School of Law, told me that he had “no doubt” that what he and Mills reported is accurate. As he recalled it, their conversation with Kuykendall centered directly on the question of Willingham’s alleged confession. “We asked her, ‘Did he confess in that conversation?’ She said, ‘No. He did not.’ ” Mills, who is still at the Tribune, confirms Possley’s account. Mills told me, “We accurately reported our encounter with her in 2004.”

On February 8, 2004—the very day that Ronnie Kuykendall claimed his sister had told him that Willingham had confessed—the Corsicana Daily Sun published an interview with Stacy Kuykendall. She said that during her visit with Willingham in prison, he maintained that the fire was accidental and that their daughter Amber had likely caused it:

Willingham laid out the same theory to Kuykendall that he suggested during the Daily Sun interview—that Amber had accidentally set the fire. He said that he woke up to her cry of “Daddy, Daddy.” Willingham said he woke up and saw smoke hovering a few feet above him, then jumped up from the bed where Amber’s body would later be found, put on his pants and ran to the kids’ room where all he could see was fire. Willingham said that he never encountered Amber in those initial moments and theorized that Amber had left the kids’ room via a hall that led both to the front door and to another entrance to his bedroom and that’s how he missed her.

In that article, Kuykendall made it clear that she did not believe Willingham’s version of events. But she never mentioned a confession. While I was reporting my New Yorker article, I tried to talk to Stacy Kuykendall, but she said that she no longer wanted to discuss the case. I did ask her if she stood by her statements to the Tribune and to the Daily Sun. She said, “If I said it, then it’s true.”

In the course of reporting my story, I also spoke to John Jackson, who prosecuted Willingham. He spoke about the contradictions between Kuykendall’s public statements and her brother’s affidavit. “She’s given very different stories about what happened on this particular day right up to the date of his execution,” Jackson said. “It’s hard for me to make heads or tails of anything she said or didn’t say.”

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